It’s had to believe that it’s already been a year since the Supreme Court struck down the “may issue” permitting schemes in New York and seven other states, in part because it doesn’t seem like much has changed in those anti-gun states over the past twelve months. In fact, things have arguably gotten worse for gun owners in many of those states, with anti-2A politicians replacing the unconstitutional permitting laws with new restrictions banning concealed carry in most public settings, raising the costs to obtain a carry license, and imposing a host of new mandates that still provide issuing authorities broad discretion to determine who is “suitable” to exercise their fundamental right to keep and bear arms.

Bruen was a good decision, but the backlash it’s generated on the Left has given the gun control lobby a shot in the arm. We’ve seen Illinois and Washington impose new bans on so-called assault weapons, red-flag laws enshrined in Minnesota and Michigan and expanded in Colorado and Connecticut, and cities like Columbus, Ohio; St. Paul, Minnesota; and Indianapolis, Indiana pass local gun control ordinances that directly contradict firearm preemption laws in those states.

We’ve also seen, however, California Gov. Gavin Newsom call for a 28th Amendment that would enshrine waiting periods, a ban on “assault weapons”, universal background checks, and an under-21 gun ban. We’ve seen Here4TheKids try to rally white women to engage in mass protests at the Colorado state capitol, demanding Gov. Jared Polis sign an executive order immediately banning gun sales and ordering all gun owners to hand in their firearms in exchange for a paltry amount of cash. Those are not the signs of a movement that’s confident it’s winning in the long term; quite the opposite as a matter of fact. The truth is that while the Bruen decision has led to a flurry of anti-gun legislation in blue states around the country, many of those new laws aren’t going to survive scrutiny under the test laid out by the Supreme Court one year ago.

The gun control lobby knows this, which is why groups like Giffords are now gaslighting on the Bruen decision and claiming it’s both an unprecedented assault on “common sense” restrictions and a ruling that’s actually anti-2A at its heart.

Schrödinger's Bruen: Simultaneously an incorrect decision that will cause gun control across the country to be struck down and also a decision that was intended to uphold literally every gun law that isn't may-issue or a handgun ban https://t.co/HbrCPGy3iM

— Firearms Policy Coalition (@gunpolicy) June 21, 2023

It may seem like Bruen‘s effects have been limited, but I think that has more to do with the slow pace of litigation than the substance of the ruling itself. In Maryland, more than 80,000 residents applied for a concealed carry license in the six months following the Bruen decision; an eightfold increase over the number of applicants in the last year that the state still required applicants to demonstrate a justifiable need to carry a firearm before issuing them a carry license. Hawaii and San Francisco have been forced to issue their first concealed carry licenses in years if not decades, and while it’s not a direct result of Bruen, we’ve also seen Florida and Nebraska adopt permitless carry laws that allow legal gun owners to lawfully carry without the need for a state-issued permission slip at all.

I said a year ago that the Bruen decision wasn’t going to immediately upend the Second Amendment landscape, but that in the long run the decision was going to be hugely important. Twelve months after the Supreme Court ruled school segregation was unconstitutional in Brown v. Board of Education, the vast majority of impacted schools had yet to integrate, and in fact it took more than a decade before the schools in Prince Edward County, Virginia complied with the Court’s decision. During that eleven year span local officials went to far as to shut down the public schools rather than allow black and white students to attend class together, but eventually even the die-hard segregationists were defeated in their attempts to defy SCOTUS.

We’re in a similar spot in our current civil rights struggle; anti-gun politicians engaged in their own massive resistance to we the people exercising our fundamental right to keep and bear arms, putting up as many barriers and roadblocks as they can dream up between us and our rights. Relief won’t be instantaneous (clearly), and in some cases it might not come at all, but unless the current makeup of the Court has a dramatic change of heart and constitutional perspective Bruen and the history, text, and tradition test laid out by SCOTUS will render many of these infringements unenforceable and unallowable under our Constitution. I hope it doesn’t take another decade before our Second Amendment rights are secured, but twelve months after Bruen came down we’re slowly headed in the right direction.